How I GCP Certified: Passing the GCP Professional Cloud Architect Exam Guide Tips
I wrote the GCP Professional Cloud Architect exam and passed. Yaay! Here are my immediate impressions and notes. Hope it is useful to future test takers.
- Currently, an exam is available in English, Japanese, and Spanish. To check all Google certifications and their available languages, click here.
- The value of the exam is the same regardless of the method chosen.
- The test is valid for 2 years, and GCP sends notifications of 3, 2, and 1 month as the only one for those who recertify.
- More information about recertification can be found at this link.
- The test is 120 minutes long and has 60 questions in total. Google does not say the minimum score a person must achieve to pass the test. According to Google’s website:
“Why don’t I receive my score or any feedback when I submit my exam?
Our exams are designed to determine only whether or not an individual meets a minimum passing standard. They are not intended to be used as a diagnostic tool or to spread people out on a scale of ability. For this reason, numerical scores are not meaningful for the examinee and can be misinterpreted.”
At the end of the test, you receive a notification if you passed or not, but you receive a communication that the confirmation that you passed needs to be validated by Google, so you can receive your badge and the OK that you passed.
Here below is an example of what appeared on my screen right after the test.
Here is the confirmation email I received after 7–10 days of the exam:
My Certification
Exam Preparation — Concepts you should understand for this exam include
- Design and plan a cloud solution architecture
- Manage and provision the cloud solution infrastructure
- Design for security and compliance
- Analyze and optimize technical and business processes
- Manage implementations of cloud architecture
- Ensure solution and operations reliability
This exam objectively measures an individual’s ability to demonstrate the critical job skills for the role.
Exam Guide
A Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect enables organizations to leverage Google Cloud technologies. Through an understanding of cloud architecture and Google technology, this individual designs, develops, and manages robust, secure, scalable, highly available, and dynamic solutions to drive business objectives. The Cloud Architect should be proficient in all aspects of enterprise cloud strategy, solution design, and architectural best practices. The Cloud Architect should also be experienced in software development methodologies and approaches including multi-tiered distributed applications which span multicloud or hybrid environments.
Case studies
During the exam for the Cloud Architect Certification, some of the questions may refer you to a case study that describes a fictitious business and solution concept. These case studies are intended to provide additional context to help you choose your answers. Review the case studies that may be used in the exam.
Section 1: Designing and planning a cloud solution architecture
1.1 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets business requirements. Considerations include:
● Business use cases and product strategy
● Cost optimization
● Supporting the application design
● Integration with external systems
● Movement of data
● Design decision trade-offs
● Build, buy, modify, or deprecate
● Success measurements (e.g., key performance indicators [KPI], return on investment [ROI], metrics)
● Compliance and observability
1.2 Designing a solution infrastructure that meets technical requirements. Considerations include:
● High availability and failover design
● Elasticity of cloud resources with respect to quotas and limits
● Scalability to meet growth requirements
● Performance and latency
1.3 Designing network, storage, and compute resources. Considerations include:
● Integration with on-premises/multicloud environments
● Cloud-native networking (VPC, peering, firewalls, container networking)
● Choosing data processing technologies
● Choosing appropriate storage types (e.g., object, file, databases)
● Choosing compute resources (e.g., preemptible, custom machine type, specialized workload)
● Mapping compute needs to platform products
1.4 Creating a migration plan (i.e., documents and architectural diagrams). Considerations include:
● Integrating solutions with existing systems
● Migrating systems and data to support the solution
● Software license mapping
● Network planning
● Testing and proofs of concept
● Dependency management planning
1.5 Envisioning future solution improvements. Considerations include:
● Cloud and technology improvements
● Evolution of business needs
● Evangelism and advocacy
Section 2: Managing and provisioning a solution infrastructure
2.1 Configuring network topologies. Considerations include:
● Extending to on-premises environments (hybrid networking)
● Extending to a multicloud environment that may include Google Cloud to Google Cloud communication
● Security protection (e.g. intrusion protection, access control, firewalls)
2.2 Configuring individual storage systems. Considerations include:
● Data storage allocation
● Data processing/compute provisioning
● Security and access management
● Network configuration for data transfer and latency
● Data retention and data life cycle management
● Data growth planning
2.3 Configuring compute systems. Considerations include:
● Compute resource provisioning
● Compute volatility configuration (preemptible vs. standard)
● Network configuration for compute resources (Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, serverless networking)
● Infrastructure orchestration, resource configuration, and patch management
● Container orchestration
Section 3: Designing for security and compliance
3.1 Designing for security. Considerations include:
● Identity and access management (IAM)
● Resource hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects)
● Data security (key management, encryption, secret management)
● Separation of duties (SoD)
● Security controls (e.g., auditing, VPC Service Controls, context aware access, organization policy)
● Managing customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud Key Management Service
● Remote access
3.2 Designing for compliance. Considerations include:
● Legislation (e.g., health record privacy, children’s privacy, data privacy, and ownership)
● Commercial (e.g., sensitive data such as credit card information handling, personally identifiable information [PII])
● Industry certifications (e.g., SOC 2)
● Audits (including logs)
Section 4: Analyzing and optimizing technical and business processes
4.1 Analyzing and defining technical processes. Considerations include:
● Software development life cycle (SDLC)
● Continuous integration / continuous deployment
● Troubleshooting / root cause analysis best practices
● Testing and validation of software and infrastructure
● Service catalog and provisioning
● Business continuity and disaster recovery
4.2 Analyzing and defining business processes. Considerations include:
● Stakeholder management (e.g. influencing and facilitation)
● Change management
● Team assessment / skills readiness
● Decision-making processes
● Customer success management
● Cost optimization / resource optimization (capex / opex)
4.3 Developing procedures to ensure reliability of solutions in production (e.g., chaos engineering, penetration testing)
Section 5: Managing implementation
5.1 Advising development/operation teams to ensure successful deployment of the solution. Considerations include:
● Application development
● API best practices
● Testing frameworks (load/unit/integration)
● Data and system migration and management tooling
5.2 Interacting with Google Cloud programmatically. Considerations include:
● Google Cloud Shell
● Google Cloud SDK (gcloud, gsutil and bq)
● Cloud Emulators (e.g. Cloud Bigtable, Datastore, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Firestore)
Section 6: Ensuring solution and operations reliability
6.1 Monitoring/logging/profiling/alerting solution
6.2 Deployment and release management
6.3 Assisting with the support of deployed solutions
6.4 Evaluating quality control measures.
Key items you should know before you take
- Compute Engine — This is a big part of GCP. Know it well. VM’s, Preemptibilty, Snapshots, Templates, Images, Disks, Zones, Health Checks, etc… Here is a resource that helped me with this LINK
- Region vs Multi-Region — Learn which resources can be used for multi-region and those that cannot.
- Learn which storage options are used for each use case — This awesome flow chart really helped me understand the different storage options and what service to use for different scenarios LINK
- When to use SQL over NoSQL — Learn which services support SQL and those that support NoSQL
- What is Datastore vs BigTable vs BigQuery — How much data can each hold? How do they scale? What are the common use cases? Make sure you know the differences between these products and you don’t slip up when it comes to an exam question asking exactly that.
- Cost — Learn how to save money when using different architectures to end up saving the most (i.e. Coldline is always cheaper than Nearline)
- Stackdriver — Learn what it can and can’t do. I ran into a few questions that asked if Stackdriver could be a solution for things it couldn’t do.
- Architecture — I personally found that this was the most important part of the exam, as you will need to know what type of architecture is needed for specific use cases. KNOW THIS. Here is a great link from Google’s Project Treehouse website that shows different solutions for different use cases. Understand these, at least at a high level.It will really help you out in the exam. LINK
Study Resources
Case Studies — These are a must read for the exam. Google recommends that you review them as they will be referenced. I now know why. Half of my exam referred to these and so I’m glad I went over them thoroughly.
Practice Exam — This is a valuable resource and do not take it for granted! I was able to answer 90% of these questions correctly before deciding to write the exam. Be sure you’re able to do the same, as this is an accurate assessment of your knowledge on GCP. You can take it as many times as you’d like, for every answer you get wrong, be sure to go back into the documentation and lookup the services that you need to work on before writing. An incredible gift from Google, in my opinion.
Coursera — Architecting with Google Cloud Platform — A great study guide for those just getting started on the platform. This 6 course series are filled with videos, diagrams and labs that will definitely get you ready fro the exam.
Linux Academy — Google Certified Professional — Absolutely incredible 3 part series that covers all parts of the platform much more in depth than the Coursera course (I went through both courses). Matthew Ulasien does an amazing job at explaining GCP in a way that anyone can understand. I am certain that this course is what gave me the confidence to write the exam sooner than later. Highly recommended. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
GCP Flowchart a Day — A hidden gem that is filled with a plethora of flowcharts that cover a lot of different areas within the platform.
Google Cloud Platform for AWS Professionals — For those of you with an extensive background in AWS (like me) check out this great resource from Google that will give you the AWS service and the equivalent service on GCP in detail.
Google Cloud Platform — Get your hands dirty! The best way to learn is to dive into the great depths of GCP. Click around the console, look at menu’s and do some labs on difficult concepts. You could even go outside of the regular labs and create a project for yourself. I find the best way, is to create a simple FT/Multi-AZ website that’ll get your bearings on how things work.
Documentation — And of course you can’t forget the obvious. Be sure to take a look at the different products you are studying, and try to identify the quirks on how each resource works. Resizing clusters, best practices, design patterns, use cases, etc…
Exam Tips
- I found that knowing how to architect on GCP was very valuable. There were quite a bit of questions that supplied you with key words that would steer you towards what the answer would be. If you study this, the answers to these questions will be a piece of cake.
- CASE STUDIES!!! Study them. Know them. Linux academy’s 3rd course is filled with tons of good tips on these case studies and what type of architecture they would use and why.
- When the case studies came up, be prepared for when they give you a split screen to do your work in. I know some people panicked, when it happened. Don’t panic. You can make the screen smaller by dragging it
- Did I mention, “Don’t Panic”. There are going to be questions that stump you, or you just may not know the answer at that time. Take a deep breath, and relax. It’ll come to you. If it doesn’t, flag it, and move on to the next question.
About this certification exam
Length: 2 hours
Registration fee: $200 (plus tax where applicable)
Languages: English, Japanese
Exam format: 50–60 multiple choice and multiple select questions
Case studies: Each exam includes 2 case studies that describe fictitious business and solution concepts. Case study questions make up 20–30% of the exam and assess your ability to apply your knowledge to a realistic business situation. You can view the case studies on a split screen during the exam. See the Exam Guide for the 4 available case studies.
Exam delivery method:
a. Take the online-proctored exam from a remote location
b. Take the onsite-proctored exam at a testing center
Prerequisites: None
Recommended experience: 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using Google Cloud
Certification Renewal / Recertification: Candidates must recertify in order to maintain their certification status. Unless explicitly stated in the detailed exam descriptions, all Google Cloud certifications are valid for two years from the date of certification. Recertification is accomplished by retaking the exam during the recertification eligibility time period and achieving a passing score. You may attempt recertification starting 60 days prior to your certification expiration date.
Sample questions — https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf54f7FbtSJcXUY6-DUHfBG31jZ3pujgb8-a5io_9biJsNpqg/viewform
Schedule your exam — https://www.webassessor.com/googlecloud/
Important: When doing the Qwiklabs labs, be careful not to use or activate services that are outside of the walkthrough. I say this because I once tried to “play” inside the lab to explore datasets in BigQuery and I received a notification/alert that I was prohibited from doing that (kkkrying) and that if I did it again they would take away my access to the portal. Whoops…
Other resources and websites that can help you prepare for the test:
- Google Cloud Skills Challenge: I suggest looking at this Google Challenge and looking to study there before entering a more structured (and paid) Coursera course;
- Cloud Guru: Lots of courses, forums, and resources for preparation. They also have training tests.
I hope these tips and step-by-step guides can help you prepare for Google certification! And if you want to explore the other options the company has, take a look at this link.
If you have any questions about how to get GCP certification, feel free to leave a comment or contact me.
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